Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Why is Office 2007 slow?

Public Service Announcement

I installed Office 2007 a few weeks ago. It has been extremely slow—ridiculously slow. Both Outlook and Word would take several minutes to load. Outlook would take over my computer whenever it received e-mail. Word would take several seconds to give me back control every time I switched documents.

I searched for some help at Microsoft.com. But I couldn't find any mention of the problem.

Then I used Google. (What did we do before Google?) I found a forum (ironically, Microsoft TechNet Forums) where someone was complaining about the sluggishness of the beta release of Outlook 2007. I followed the thread and found people talking about the retail release also being slow.

Bottom line:The slow behavior seems to be caused by add-ins.

It seems mostly to be caused by the Make PDF add-in. That's my initial observation. Turning off the add-ins has dramatically improved the performance of both Word 2007 and Outlook 2007.

Here's how: You must be logged in as Administrator.

In Outlook, go to Tools–>Trust Center.

Click on Add-ins in the left panel.

At the bottom of the window click on the Go button (Manage: COM Add-ins).

Uncheck any add-ins you don't need or you think might be causing a problem.

Click on OK.

I exited and restarted Outlook at this point. I don't know if it's necessary.

For Word 2007

Click on the Logo button (upper left corner).

Click on the Word Options in the bottom right.

Select Add-ins in the left panel.

Do the same steps as in Outlook.

After making these changes, Word 2007 and Outlook 2007 started working the way they should.

If you found this page by searching for your own solution, I hope it was helpful. I will update this as I find out more.

131 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Thanks!! I had a problem with Outlook 2007 running dog slow. I just disabled the addins and restarted my computer. Maybe I am jumping the gun a little, but looks like Outlook 2007 is loading much faster now.

Some other tips for speedier loading of Office 2007 programs. Although the install gives the option to overwrite previous versions of Office, one needs to be aware that it doesn't actually remove them. You should remove previous versions of MS Office from your PC, this will also speed up Word 2007. You may get start up error messages after having done this which are easily fixed. If this is the case, feel free to email me at tech@ezpc.net.au for a free, step by step fix. Also remove anything Norton. Norton is an absolute pig and degrades system performance by up to 40 percent. Why PC manufacturers choose to use this leviathan is beyond me. There are many, many freeware antivirus / malware / firewall programs which are more than comparable to expensive so-called 'top end' programs.Also view and disable any unused startup entries such as Groove etc .... Start/Run/msconfig/Startup and deselect the apps you don't require. This will speed up your PC boot time.Also don't forget... there will be no computers in Heaven, the Word declares there will be found nothing there which offends!Cheers

This is just great! The first thing I search from Google for this irritating problem and I found it right here!Even though I format my machine once before searching for it though ...Thanks for your generous for putting this up!

Thank you so much! I can't believe how easy it was to fix. I can't believe it was even possible to fix it, period! I can't believe a company would release a product with such a glaring problem that was so easy to fix.

WOW!!! Amazing. The speed. I thought it was office 2007 was just overly bloated. Appearently it was with adobe add on which was causing all the problems. I was ready to ditch office too. They ened to get the word out that adobe is screwing up office 2007. To bad we couldn't diable add on in vista to get the speed ;)

Many many blessings to you for your post of this solution, which worked perfectly. I have looked all over the Internet for help on this problem, and your solutions worked simply and perfectly. I did not relish going into my Registry to fix things despite the restore point, etc.

Add my name to the list! I upgraded to 2007 with great hesitation (even though I received a free copy from my school and was told I had to use it). The constant delay between switching documents and opening new ones was driving me crazy...Removed the add-in and worked like a charm. I can't thank you enough. You saved the computer from being recycled.

For over a year now this thread has helped those people overcome the obstinate obstacle of the bill gates scandal of annonyingly slow software. Thank you thread. Thank you for my faster word. Seriously though it helped alot.

AMAZING!! That's gotta be the best value-for-time tip I have ever got. Five clicks and my Word--which was driving me CRAZY by delaying 3s every time I switched between documents--is instantly back to normal. You da man Rod!

I don't usually leave comments, but WOW -- this was amazing -- I just upgraded on by business laptop, and almost instantly regretted it because outlook was so painfully slow -- my e-mails today have been coming in at the rate of about 5-10 / minute (it's been a busy day), and with the slowness of outlook, I could barely keep up...

I disabled some of the add-ins (mainly the ones that were new with the new version of office), and WOW -- Outlook is very, very fast right now..

I had the Visagesoft eXpertPDF addin enabled in Word 2007. Thanks to this list I've removed it and Word 2007 now works like it should always have done - no 10 second waits every time I change to a different window!!!Thanks!!!!

I didn't find any pdf add-ins in either Outlook or Word, but i disabled all that were active. In Word that was only the Bluetooth add-in.Now my PC is responsive again, as any 3GHz dual core PC should be. Thanks a lot!

Office 2007 is slow even with all addins disabled, and more, in my, and a few PC more, excel 2007 can consume all memory, real and virtual, when I make cyclic calculations in few more than 1000 words sheets. It just consumes memory byte by byte so after a few days it crashes. So the advantages that new excel has more than 65k words is a some synthetic feature for me: good sounded but none practical.

in addition to the above is you must also let one of the microsoft office's program run at start up.. ie. run cmd then msconfig then go to selective startup then go to startup on top and just simply check either grove monitor utility or microsoft office one note that will make them satrt during the boot up process,,

I had a new computer installed and I was so frustrated with Word 2007. I was tempted to go back to my older computer and use word 2003, which was faster. I was getting an hourglass for 8 seconds everytime I opened or changed word documents.

There is a way to disable the addon in Vista as well. It's just a bit different. First click on the start button, then in search, search "winword.exe" right click and click open as administrator. Then follow the same steps that were here. Special thanks to: http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/post/PLNKLJKDJPXFUQ3R

Office 2007 is a HUGE memory hog. If you are running any other programs that are large hogs as well, like Microsoft CRM for example, you need more than 1 GB RAM in your computer. Otherwise, disabling the add-ins and cleaning up your .pst files won't make much difference in the performance.

Thanks, Thanks, Thanks!I have been fighting this problem with Word and Excel being excruciatingly slow for 3 months. I removed the add-ins like you instructed to do in Word (it worked for Excel also) and the problem is gone. I did not find this solution anywhere else that I looked.

As another solution, my machine started the "slow Word 2007 thing" and it was driving me crazy. It turns out, I changed my default printer to a network printer that I normally access from my office. Apparently Word tries to connect with the default printer and if it is not available (as when you take your laptop home which I do) or when the printer itself is slow to answer (which happens in our office situation) the delay in loading word can be VERY LONG.

Thanks a million tried for some time to find answer on Microsoft website nothing!Hats off to all those people who share their experiences so willingly and freely counters some of the bad publicity the web attracts

Thank you a lot for this tip. really useful. Maybe there are more causes for slowness, but this add-ins tip really improved performance. It's the same for excel. After disabling those addins, excel is loading much faster. Thank you again:)

Instead of this tip, I had a default network print server, so this worked for me: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/280821

Spent a week or more but finally got it from, guess what, the correct terms "word 2007 slow hourglass connecting to printer" in my google search. Your site came up first, then the one from MS above, thanks!

Yesterday my MS Word began freezing and I couldn't open my doc files,because of it was crashed. I didn't know what to do next. But I used the Google and by chance detected - microsoft word file unreadable. The utility determined the issue very easy and without payment as I kept in mind. It was easy to use.

very grateful!The longer use of computers, the more software installed, registry garbage inside the computer registry will be more. Most of the software will add unnecessary junk to the registry which makes the computer crash or slower and slower. so we need registry cleaner software to slove the problem.

I found my office slowed down when trying to open a document due to a new network printer software I installed. I loaded the HP 3525n software on different machines in my building and both Office 2003 and 2007 started to lag when opening a document up from my docs or any other folder. The only work around to get Office to open faster was to either uninstall the printer software from that computer completely, or actually open up the office program such as word and then go to FILE, open and then select the document that way. The lag occurs only when I try to open the document by double clicking it, wheter it be located in the my docs folder or a place like on the desktop. Anyone know of an update or fix for this problem.

Almost 6 years after your posting and this is still helping people. All of my Office 2007 products are extremely slow to load on a Windows 7 Premium x64 with 4GB ram. This helped me track down an add-on for Word that added 5-10 seconds on startup, I removed it and startup is almost instant now. Huzzah! I will track through other Office programs soon, thank you for this insight!